


Charlie

by The_INTJ_Sagittarius_Scorpio_Gryffindork



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Smallville, Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Blatantly ignores Dark Knight Rises, F/M, Female Clark, Female Clark Kent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 04:02:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10586028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_INTJ_Sagittarius_Scorpio_Gryffindork/pseuds/The_INTJ_Sagittarius_Scorpio_Gryffindork
Summary: A simple change of sex has major repercussions.  Clark Kent was born a girl and grows up as Charlotte Kent, and there are more than a few changes as she struggles to grow her way into Superwoman.





	

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This first chapter is a prologue of sorts, a series of twenty moments that define Charlie Kent before the start of the series.

1.

From the beginning, she was never Charlotte; she was just Charlie.

Charlotte was the name of a delicate little girl, and a delicate little girl Charlie was not. She waded into rivers and ponds full of frogspawn, her jeans hiked up to her knees. She caught crickets and fireflies. She wore baseball caps and chewed and spat like a boy.

“My little tomboy,” her father called her affectionately.

She had the full run of the Kent farm in Smallville, Kansas, with its vast golden fields and ramshackle buildings, but with that came responsibilities. She put on boots and sludged through mud and muck and manure; she fed animals in stalls and fields and manned tractors; she got down and dirty doing early morning chores every single day. Hay and feed were her best friends.

Charlie’s world was the world of dusty old pickup trucks and bawdy country music. She took fishing trips with her father, went horseback riding down long back roads and hiked up tall ridges fearlessly, and from the beginning, she loved sports.

Her father would take her to games, and she would buy popcorn and hot dogs and sweet sticky cotton candy, sitting on bleachers and cheering loudly at different calls and plays, shouting as loudly in the audience as anybody else. She watched games on TV with her Dad, and called out football plays in her sleep.

Hers was the world of diners and apple pie, of tiny one screen movie theaters showing old rerun cartoons, of Main Streets and corner drug stores and antiques shops, of peaceful friendliness. She baked pies in the sunny yellow kitchen with her Mom, the scent filling the entire home. Together they tended the garden and the orchard, and from her mother Charlie learned good homestyle country cooking.

Her father’s field hand Earl decided to teach her the guitar. “Being able to play music will get you in anywhere,” he guaranteed. They sat on fence posts on the farm together, and Earl would take her through fledgling attempts at picking and strumming a guitar, she bent over the instrument. This was hard for one reason.

Charlie had… unique abilities. Supernatural intelligence, but more importantly, enormous speed and strength. She could run faster than a bullet, so fast no one could see her, so fast the rest of the world was standing still. She could weight lift tractors. No one knew except for her parents. They were afraid she’d be taken away if people found out what she could do - afraid the world wasn’t ready for her.

Her control wasn’t always that good as a kid. She had to work at it over time. She wasn’t even allowed on playdates, for fear of hurting somebody. As for softball? Forget it. So trying to do something as delicate as playing the guitar was something of a trial for her.

She spent hours upon hours bent over a guitar, trying not to break the strings. Slowly, she mastered the instrument. They said girls couldn’t play the guitar? Screw that. Charlie could do anything she damn well pleased. And she couldn’t sing worth for crap, but she sang loudly anyway.

From the beginning, she was determined not to be afraid of anything. Charlie treated life passionately - in everything from costumes to dancing, she had fun, she was fearless. She may not have been very good - at dancing she was terrible - but she danced around her bedroom getting ready for school anyway.

One thing she did eventually get good at? The guitar.

2.

One day at school, she decided to run up to two boys who were playing swords, out in a vast green field on the play yard. It had looked like fun. “Can I join you?” she asked fearlessly, lifting her chin, defiance in her eyes.

She was nervous, but she’d be damned if she showed it.

The boys looked at one another: one was Greg Arkin, a boy with glasses and an interest in bugs, the other was Pete Ross, a round-faced dark-skinned boy. “You’re a girl,” Greg pointed out. 

“Then this should be easy for you,” said Charlie.

So they let her join. Their pride had been pricked. Charlie faced Greg first, with a stick for a sword like his was. Pete watched in admiration as she parried, knocked the stick out of Greg’s hand, and stuck her own stick right up close to his heart.

“Gotcha,” she said, grinning, as Greg stared at her in surprise.

“I think we should show her,” said Pete excitedly.

“The treehouse? It’s for boys only!” Greg protested.

“Yeah, but I’m practically a boy,” said Charlie. “Look.” She hacked, leaned forward, and spat on the ground. Incontrovertible proof she was not really a girl.

Greg and Pete glanced at each other. “Alright,” Greg sighed, resigned. “Let’s do it.”

They went after school. Greg’s Dad had built him a huge tree fort, out in the woods near the old Creekside Foundry. Heights made Charlie nervous, but she was determined not to look like a girly wimp in front of Greg and Pete. She climbed up into the tree fort, and looked around. “This is cool!” she said, impressed. It was actually a very wide wooden space, covered in blankets and action figures.

“Totally boss,” Pete agreed, nodding and grinning. Greg looked her over, frowning.

“Just make sure you don’t mess anything up,” he said. “But from now on you are honorarily a boy.” He pointed formally to the sign on the tree fort wall: No Girls Allowed.

Charlie, Greg, and Pete started playing there every afternoon after school. To Charlie’s delight, she never messed up once - she hid her true strength and speed so well neither boy ever noticed a thing. They explored the woods, and that was fun, though she always got sick if she edged too close to the creepy old foundry, which had been destroyed by meteor rock in the Smallville meteor shower when she was three - the same year she was adopted.

On the day Earl left the farm to go work at the local Luthor Corp plant, Charlie gazed after him solemnly as he trudged down the dirt road of Hickory Lane in the dust, past the farmhouses, past the cornfields. Then -

“Charlie, come on! You’re slow!”

Charlie smiled. That was Pete’s voice. She turned around and ran after her guy friends.

She had new people to play with.

3.

As she grew older, Charlie developed a love for books.

Her favorites were nonfiction - particularly philosophy, psychology, and the theology of different religions - and dystopian and sci fi novels. Pete and Greg also showed her comic books and trading cards, but those were the sorts of things she did more with her friends. On her own, she could page through countless books that introduced strange new ideas, pages rustling as she read, her eyes skittering down the page.

No one could figure how Charlie learned to read so fast, so quickly. Little did they know: her reading speed capacity was not entirely natural.

Many days, she would head down into the orchard on her family’s farm. She would grab an apple to munch on, curl up underneath the shade of a tree amid the grass and bugs, and read for hours in the shady sunshine.

Charlie became to books what worms were to apples. She dug right through them, taking all the juiciest tidbits for herself.

4.

In elementary school one day, they had a women in math and science fair. 

Her teacher, Mrs Harker, insisted that Charlie go. “I’ve never seen grades like yours in the maths and sciences before - not in such a young child,” she said.

So Charlie walked into the school auditorium curiously. It was littered with little tables, women in different maths and sciences giving presentations at each table. Girls walked around, going from exhibit to exhibit, picking what was interesting to them.

Charlie walked from exhibit to exhibit, hearing different presentations. She became increasingly awed and fascinated as the day went on. These women were amazing! They talked so lovingly about all the things that most interested her, all the things she was best at! And they did it in spite of the idea surrounding the maths and sciences that women couldn’t do it. Science answered the big questions, and that was what Charlie wanted to do.

On the way out, there was a table with a sign-up sheet. Girls at the school could sign up for different classes and activities in the maths and sciences. Charlie paused, and then scribbled down her name for two things: after school astronomy classes for children, and the school robotics team - which competed against other children’s schools in Metropolis County, and involved computer science and engineering.

She went home that night and told her parents. They were very proud of her. “Charlie, that’s wonderful!” said her mother, delighted. “Women should always be as educated as possible. I fully believe that.” Charlie’s mother was taking night classes, one or two at a time for several years, over at the local community college to finish her degree. “That could make for a fantastic career, if you continue it through college.”

“Astronomy, eh?” said her father, interested. “Come with me.”

And he led her out to the barn, and up the stairs to the loft he’d built for her up above the barn. It was just her space, a place she could relax to hang out and be alone. Jokingly, her father called it her Fortress of Solitude.

He went into the back, and brought out a very old telescope. Charlie gasped in delight. “It’s old, and worn,” said Dad. “But my father gave me this, when I was kid. You might make better use out of it than I ever did.” Dad smiled. “Want to come see?”

Charlie walked slowly up and looked through the telescope, training it through the big barn window and up to the clear starry country skies above. “Wow,” she whispered, the blue-black velvet dotted with lights so close she thought she could touch it.

“There you go,” she heard her Dad say. “The whole galaxy, right there at your fingertips.”

It would form into a lifelong love. Her Dad may not have much money, but he did what any good father wished they could - he gave his daughter the universe.

Robotics team turned out to be fun, and in fact she would continue it into high school, getting into the increasingly advanced teams. She was one of the only girls on the team, but she was a quick learner and was soon coming up with new and inventive ideas for their robots in battles. She grappled with ideas like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, artistic craftsmanship, and computer science like she was born to. 

They always went to Metropolis City for their competitions, taking a bus, and Charlie would watch out the window in quiet amazement as the great city full of tall buildings, little shops, graffiti, colorful people, and noise moved beyond her. 

They spent most of their time in Metropolis at competitions - operating their robots across the floor, each team giving out shouts of joy when they made a good move and groans when they were beaten. Charlie, competitive till the end, often operated their robot herself, tongue between her teeth.

But they did go to eat at cafes and restaurants in the city. One day, Charlie was walking along behind her group, looking around, fascinated - and she saw a mugger suddenly hit an old lady, grab her handbag, brush past her, and sprint off down the street. Charlie felt a shot of anger. She looked around to make sure no one was watching her -

Then she moved so fast it must have looked like she’d just disappeared on the spot.

A great whirl of wind brushed past the mugger, slamming him into the far wall, and when he looked down the handbag was gone. Another brush of wind, and it was back in the surprised old lady’s possession. The gust of wind had righted her, pushing her back onto her feet in a feat of steady strength.

They looked around, puzzled, but the street was empty now of any strange burst of energy. There were only the normal passing people, including a little girl walking once more carefully casual behind her elementary school class.

Freaked out and skittish, the mugger hurried away, and the stunned little old lady was left with her handbag.

Charlie smiled.

5.

Charlie walked up to her mother and father one day. “I want a pet,” she announced matter of factly.

Her parents looked at one another in surprise. “What’s one more animal, I suppose?” said her Mom, shrugging.

“Mr Bell down the road is breeding dogs -” her father began, but Charlie shook her head firmly.

“I want to go to a shelter,” she said. “I want to save a pet who doesn’t have a home. There are lots of them, and I want one. Two, actually. I was thinking a cat and a dog, two animals who get on well with each other.”

In the end, Charlie got her pets. Her Dad drove her into town to the local shelter, and she walked into the back, going down the stone row of animals in little units, watching them all studiously for signs of personality.

Eventually, she picked out a mellow old female golden retriever, and a rangy, wary grey tabby tomcat. The golden retriever’s name was Molly, while the tomcat’s name was Milo.

“I’m going to give them a good home,” said Charlie proudly as she paid (with money from her Dad). “Lots of food and happiness.”

Her Dad and the worker at the shelter smiled. “You have a good heart,” her father said. “Keep that.”

6.

As she got older, Charlie got into video games.

Competitive as she was, and into sci fi, it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise. Video games were addicting in the best way. She lost herself in plays and strategies, games and stories, for hours, not afraid even of the most gruesome or horrifying premises.

Her mother would come into her room, find her yelling and swearing at her computer screen because she’d just lost a match, and would sigh, exasperated.

When she’d adopted a little girl, she’d expected a dainty little thing in a fairy princess costume, like Lana Lang next door. Charlie had never been that kind of girl. She was a lot like a boy - she drank milk out of the bottle just like her father, and her manners were usually about on par with that good. She knew how to cook, at least, how to bake and garden, but being quiet and charitable and feminine did not come naturally to her. Her mother was forever scolding her. Charlie was not Lana.

Somehow, though, when Martha looked at Lana’s chipper popularity and fake plastic smiles, she couldn’t say she minded. She’d take it all - weird powers, swearing at computer screens, and bad manners included.

7.

Greg’s parents had gotten divorced.

Charlie tried to be there for him, calling him several times, but he never called her back. Radio silence. He didn’t talk to anyone at school anymore, and retreated into himself. She talked with Pete - he got the same thing.

It frustrated Charlie, because she wanted to be there for her friend. But he wouldn’t let her. Greg’s relationships with the people around him never recovered from his Dad leaving the family. Perhaps it had been in the nature of the leaving.

Greg’s Dad had just gotten up and walked out of the house one day, gotten into his car, and never looked back.

“It’s horrible and I just wish there was something I could do,” Charlie told Pete, quieter than usual, frowning ahead of herself, troubled. They were sitting on the steps of a distant part of their middle school campus, watching Greg eat lunch silently and alone in the distance.

Pete nodded. “I know what you mean,” he admitted, but he was watching Charlie - his best friend. Who could stun people with unusual moments of touching emotion and vulnerability, who was loud and funny and afraid of nothing, who was tough and told it like it was, who was brilliant in ways few women allowed themselves to be, who was competitive and loved arguing and didn’t like telling anyone she could play the guitar.

He knew, he’d memorized, everything about her. And as he got older, and tried to tell himself his feelings were entirely brotherly, he nevertheless began to notice more - the long shining dark hair underneath her baseball cap, her brilliant blue eyes, her tall form, taller even than him, continually growing out of ever shortening pairs of jeans and capris.

Pete looked at Charlie, and felt something he didn’t understand, something that - at twelve - he didn’t have a name for.

8.

“Class, this is our new student from Metropolis, Chloe Sullivan,” said Charlie’s middle school teacher, waving to the little blonde girl standing next to him. “Miss Kent, if you will show her around on her first day, please?”

He looked at Charlie meaningfully.

So Charlie showed Chloe around the school. They got to talking, and Charlie learned Chloe’s hero was Nellie Bly, the female investigative reporter from a bygone era who’d been brave enough to fake insanity so she could write about the inside conditions of a mental asylum. “I’m going to be like her,” said Chloe bossily. “An awesome investigative reporter back in Metropolis. As soon as I graduate from this little place, I’m gone - back to where I belong.”

Charlie smiled. She was not a big fan of modern day muckraking, though she doubted Chloe was that kind of person. “My heroes are the coders and computer scientists who got the first man into space,” she said instead. “The ones working for NASA. They were all women, you know. Only when it began to be seen as important, complicated work did men begin doing it.”

“A scientist and a reporter.” Chloe seemed interested. “That has promise. So where do you live?”

“Oh, my family runs a farm outside town,” said Charlie. She leant so much extra assistance with her powers, they never had hired a new field hand.

Chloe seemed ecstatic. “Really?! Like Amish people?!”

Charlie laughed. “Not all farmers are Amish, Chloe,” she said. “But you’re welcome to come back with me and check it out if you want.”

So Charlie took Chloe back to her place on the bus and showed her around the farm, including the Fortress loft. Charlie had hung it with old quilts and fairy lights, in what her mother dryly called “a surprising show of femininity.”

“This is so cool!” said Chloe enviously. “You have this whole place all to yourself?!”

After that day, Chloe seemed to decide she and Charlie were friends, and took to walking up to Charlie and talking to her in the halls matter of factly with an impressive amount of confidence for a middle schooler. Pete and Charlie let her in easily enough, in part because their friends circle had seemed rather empty with just the two of them.

Chloe became the new third in their close-knit friendship. Blunt and loyal like nobody’s business, she became Charlie’s first female best friend.

They even talked and giggled about something Charlie had never been able to reveal to someone before - they could discuss boys.

9.

As she got older, Charlie got into music.

Trailing through different musical genres, styles, and mediums, she formed a love for punk and classic rock. She bought vinyl as well as mp3, having a record player and an mp3 player both.

Mp3 was better for on the go, but what she really enjoyed was putting on a record in her bedroom, then lying back and letting herself get swept away by rock music, prone on her bed, strumming the guitar on her stomach absently.

10.

The first time she saw roller derby, she fell in love. 

Chloe took her to a match, being more used to it in Metropolis and finding out they also had roller derby tournaments in Smallville. They sat in the stands inside the rink, amid the loud cheers, and Charlie watched with increasing fascination as the tough women zoomed around on the rink, slamming into each other.

It was a sport purely for girls, a tough tactile sport, and she’d been waiting for this her whole life.

She knew her parents wouldn’t agree, would be afraid of her revealing her powers, so she bought her skates in secret with Chloe and, lying to her parents and telling them she was with a friend, she practiced for endless hours out on the rink in her skates in her off-time.

Once, an older women’s roller derby team was watching her practice, and one of them finally called out thoughtfully, “Hey, kid. You want us to show you some moves?!”

Charlie brightened, delighted.

She proved herself capable of putting in the time, sweat, and bruises to make sure she was genuinely good at roller derby. She practiced with older women’s teams, gleaning as much as she could from them, and she even made up her own roller girl name: Charli Horse.

When she finally told her parents what she wanted to do, they were furious.

“Charlie, you could kill somebody out there!” her Dad said, disbelieving and outraged.

“No, you don’t understand! When I’m on normal human rollerskates, my powers aren’t in control! I’m just like everyone else!” said Charlie eagerly. “It would be the one sport where I couldn’t hurt anyone worse than usual, and I wouldn’t even be cheating! It’s perfect!

“Come on, Dad, I really want to do this,” she pleaded.

“I’m not letting you out there to play a rough contact sport,” said her father darkly. “You could hurt someone, you could reveal something you shouldn’t.”

Charlie stomped her foot and looked away, tears in her eyes. “Don’t you trust me when I tell you I’m not going to hurt anyone?!”

“That’s not the issue here.”

“Yes, it is!” Charlie stormed from the room.

The fight was over for now, but not for good. Charlie put her black hair back into a ponytail, painted herself with fake tattoos, and continued practicing out on the rink in her off-time with the older skaters. The adrenaline - there was nothing like it. Chloe continued to support her and lie for her, not knowing the real reason for the denial and considering Charlie’s parents “backwards.”

Charlie kept practicing and going to watch roller derby tournaments. She hoped for high school.

11.

As she grew into her curves, Charlie found her body type was not the slim perfect one found in magazines.

She envied people like Lana Lang, who always looked so skinny and amazing. Charlie wasn’t overweight, not exactly, but she had big curves, big thighs, big breasts, big everything. She was tall and curvy and bigger even than most of the guys she knew - certainly bigger than Pete.

She had lots of conversations with her Mom and with Chloe, who tried to support her and tell her she looked beautiful, understanding in that way only women could.

“I don’t like how self conscious this makes me,” Charlie told her mother tearfully, on her bed one night. 

“Appearance for women is still important. It makes sense. No one is entirely exempt from that, Charlie,” her mother told her simply. “The point is not to let it control your life. You’re beautiful, just not in the way supermodels are.” She held up a Heart album from Charlie’s record collection. “You have good role models, yes?”

She was rewarded when Charlie smiled.

“Don’t worry,” Chloe said, being more pragmatic. “All those guys we giggle over in the hallways? They all check out your ass now as you walk by. It’s totally not that big of a deal.”

Chloe didn’t say what she was thinking, which was that poor Pete was checking Charlie out a lot, too.

12.

Chloe started reporting for the middle school newspaper, and she got Charlie into it. Charlie’s political awakening had slowly been coming over time. It had happened when she’d realized women didn’t play guitar, again when she’d realized women didn’t do math and science, again when she’d realized women didn’t do contact sports, and again when she’d realized women didn’t have big curves.

Not in actuality, of course. But on TV and in popular mythology.

She and Chloe - who was born to that sort of thing - became proud feminists. Through her parents and their organic farm, their loud opinions on rural preservation and eco ruining corporations, Charlie also became an environmentalist. She and Chloe got more into liberal politics and globalism as well as school political issues, wrote opinion pieces for their school newspaper, and laughed hysterically over all the grammatically incorrect hate mail they got in response. (Usually, they suspected, it was from dudes.) 

Charlie started a political blog while Chloe started a website she called The Wall of Weird. Chloe was a conspiracy theorist who believed the number of weird mutations and strange happenings in Smallville had shot sky-high since the Smallville meteor shower.

“It’s the green meteor rock that’s doing it,” she insisted, impassioned. “It’s irradiated.” Pete always laughed her off and teased her. Charlie, who wanted her own ideas to be taken more seriously, took Chloe’s seriously out of simple respect.

Pete could be such a guy sometimes.

Charlie’s backpack stuffed with books began to be littered with sarcastic and political pins; same with the stickers on her laptop cover. One said in bold capital letters: PROUD BITCH.

13.

And then Charlie got into fashion. As she grew into teenagehood, she found baseball caps, capris, and jeans to be suddenly inadequate. (This totally bewildered Pete, who was very confused by his tomboy best friend looking like a woman.) Inspired by her love for vinyl and classic rock, she took to wearing vintage dresses, red lipstick, and costume jewelry. This last was because ear piercing for her had gone a little bit wrong.

Her mother had tried to pierce her ears at home, and they’d discovered that Charlie had invulnerable skin. Hence the necessity for fake tattoos. Nothing could pierce the hard shell of her skin.

Around this time she got her first period, and that was when her heat vision first appeared and began going awry. Charlie discovered that when she got angry, she could set things on fire with her eyes, and it had taken a couple of weeks of careful control to get that one down.

“What is wrong with me?” she asked her parents at last, frustrated. “How can I do all these things?”

And so her parents sighed, and took her down into the storm cellar, and tore the tarp off of something in the corner that she’d always thought was a piece of old farm equipment. It was not. It was a tiny, child-sized spaceship.

“We found you next to this out in a field,” said her father, pained. “The day of the meteor shower. We… we think it was bringing you. The adoption papers were forged.”

Charlie choked past her shock. “And… and you never thought of telling me?!” she demanded.

“We were trying to protect you,” said her father.

“We didn’t want you to grow up feeling like a freak,” her mother admitted.

Charlie barked out a sarcastic laugh. “Too late for that! Humans bewilder me! I’m always guessing at their emotional states, what they find acceptable and what they don’t; I’m always three steps ahead of them; I’m always hiding who I am; I never felt like I fit in!” She was truly shouting by the end.

“Charlie -” her mother began, pained, but Charlie was fourteen and angry and confused and hurt that her parents had lied to her for so many years. She speed ran away.

She ended up wandering the forests near her family’s farm, because hanging out in a graveyard was for overdramatic losers. She leaned against a tree and sighed, staring skyward at the night above her. That night sky had always left her so calm, made her feel so comforted.

Now she knew why. It was because she was from there. What was her home planet like? Would she have fit in there, she wondered? And why was she here? Why had she been sent away, one little child in a tiny spaceship, amid a litter of sharp meteor fragments, before she was old enough to so much as remember her home planet?

So many questions and no answers. She’d thought if she could discover why she was the way that she was, there would be no questions left. She had been wrong.

She eventually wandered back into the kitchen through the back door. Her parents, who had been sitting at the table with mugs of tea, suddenly stood up.

“I get it,” Charlie admitted. “I get why you kept the fact that I’m an alien from me. I get why you don’t want me to do roller derby. I know you’re always trying to protect me. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.”

“... My Dad didn’t tell me he had cancer until he was nearly dead,” Dad admitted, looking tired. “I’m sorry. I always promised myself I’d never keep something like that from my child. But it’s not always that simple.”

“We do love you, Charlie,” said Mom. “Always. We promise. We may not always agree… but the love itself? That doesn’t change.”

Charlie walked forward and hugged them.

Eventually, on a clever whim, she began doing tests on the metal of the spaceship. She couldn’t figure out how to open it, but she found the metal itself had strange hypnotic properties, making it and everything around it look strangely innocuous, innocent.

She carved out a piece of metal from the spaceship, dyed it black, and used it to make fake square plastic black-framed glasses. If people could be hypnotized into thinking she was normal and harmless… all the better for her. Charlie had a big personality, and if she didn’t want people to connect her with big strong supernatural events, she needed all the alien help she could get.

Charlie looked bizarre, she decided, staring at herself in the mirror of her bedroom. Black ponytail, costume jewelry, vintage dress, red lipstick, obvious curves, square black glasses, fake tattoos. Opinionated pin-ridden backpack, stuffed with books and science materials and hidden roller skates. Checkered pajama pants and a gigantic T shirt for PJ’s.

Bizarre. But she liked it.

14.

Charlie may have saved her family eight field hands, but that might not be enough. Her family’s farm still wasn’t doing well. Her parents never told her this, but she overheard conversations about money and did the mathematical calculations in her head for herself.

They were in debt. Lots of debt.

So without telling her parents that was why she was doing it, she put in an application to become a part time waitress and barista after school at a little coffee place and cafe on Smallville’s Main Street called The Beanery. It was right in the middle of downtown Smallville, right inside town, which she began to explore on her own for the first time.

Her application passed, and she sat down to her interview. The woman who ran The Beanery had a thin face, crooked teeth, and short dyed hair; she looked around middle aged. Her name was Sam. She scowled at Charlie.

“Charlotte Kent,” she said.

“Just Charlie is fine,” Charlie blurted out before she could stop herself, then winced internally when Sam glared at her. Oops. Rule number one: don’t correct the potential employer.

“Charlie,” Sam repeated testily, “why do you want this job?”

“Honestly, ma’am?” said Charlie. “Because I need it. Badly. I want to help out my family and we’re not doing so well. I promise I’m a fast learner, and I’ve been working hard sloughing on a farm my entire life. I know I’m up to doing any work you put in front of me - and I have lots of incentive.”

Sam stared at her for a long moment. “Blunt, tough, hardworking, and to the point,” she said at last. “I like that. This place is pretty hipster for a tiny town like Smallville, and your appearance checks out.”

Charlie wasn’t sure what to think of that, but Sam held out her hand.

“The job is yours,” she said. Charlie beamed and reached out her hand, and they shook on it.

Getting used to the job at The Beanery was the hardest part. Charlie had to be a calm waitress with a good memory and an excellent and fast barista, all rolled into one.

But she did learn fast and she was used to hard work. Pretty soon, she and the other girl on her shift, a ponytailed community college student named Zoe, developed a teasing, laughing rapporte, and Charlie became a regular fixture at The Beanery.

Sometimes Sam and Zoe even defended her. A jock at The Beanery once called to her, laughing, “Hey! Fat girl!” as she was behind the counter making coffee.

Without pausing, Charlie grabbed a cup of coffee, tossed it at his head, it went all over his face - And as he stood there sputtering, she said expectantly, “Yeah?”

“You - you just threw coffee on me!” he sputtered, outraged. 

“Damn right she did!” Sam snapped. “Get your sorry ass outta here!”

“GO!” Zoe snapped a dish towel at him and he ran off out of The Beanery.

One amusing result of her time at this job was that Charlie became both a coffee addict and a coffee snob. “The Beanery ruined coffee for me,” she was prone to saying dramatically as she mixed her fancy European coffee together in her family’s kitchen.

15.

She was working at The Beanery when she got the call on her cell phone. She didn’t answer her Dad when he called the first few times, because she was on shift, but after the third call she began to get nervous.

“Sam,” she said, walking over to her boss, “my Dad has called me three times and he knows I’m on shift. Can I call him back? It could be some sort of family emergency.”

Sam gave you more leniency once she was convinced you were a hard worker. “... Make it quick,” she said at last, and Charlie hurried out the back door and grabbed her cell phone to call her father back.

“Hi, Dad?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“... Charlie, Molly died while you were at school today. Old age. I’m sorry, honey,” said her Dad.

Zoe found Charlie a few minutes later, crying on the back steps. 

“Hey, Charlie, Sam’s about to have you murder - Oh God what’s wrong?” she said with dread.

“My - my dog died,” Charlie sobbed into her hand.

“Oh wow. Okay, yeah, I’m calling in Alexa. That officially falls into the realm of shit someone else gets to cover you for,” said Zoe, and then she sat down on the steps beside Charlie. “Hey. It’s okay. You made her really happy, you know?”

Charlie sniffled. Her mascara must be a mess. “Thanks, Zoe,” she said, smiling tremblingly.

She cried a lot over the next few days, especially the day of the cremation when she had to say goodbye. Molly’s ashes were put in a little heart shaped box and were set on Charlie’s school desk at home.

Still teary, Charlie cuddled on her bed with Milo that night. “It’s just you and me now, buddy,” she whispered.

16.

Perhaps because of this, Charlie’s parents allowed her to save up some waitressing money and buy an old car from a nearby neighbor who would sell it for cheap.

“He’s got an old Mustang he’s willing to sell to anybody who can fix it up,” said her Dad. “And I know how much you love old cars.”

Charlie brightened. She’d been able to drive since she was twelve, farming community and all, but she’d always had to take the bus before because her parents hadn’t been able to afford another car. 

Now, she had her own money.

So Charlie bought the old Mustang and set to fixing it up in her off time. She called it her “baby.” It ran like shit even after she fixed it up, doing everything from refusing to start to breaking down, but she drove it anyway and pretty soon her car could be seen every school day in the student lot, coughing and belching out angry, loud black smoke.

Her bumper sticker began: “Bumper stickers are an inane way of communicating…” and then the writing slowly got smaller until it was virtually unreadable.

17.

Celebrating her shitty new car, Charlie took Pete and Chloe on a road trip the summer before their first year of high school.

They drove all the way up the East Coast. Charlie’s car stalled in weird places and Chloe and Pete the map masters had the combined sense of direction of a blind dog, leading to all kinds of hilarious situations, but somehow they made it all the way through the trip and all the way back home to Smallville.

They passed across beautiful countryside, through mountains and past ocean water. They also passed into New York, Star City, and Gotham. There was something almost hypnotic about driving down endless roads, snacking and listening to music on their mp3s, stopping at rest stops and gas stations, taking photos and seeing new places. Charlie thought she could do that forever. She did all the driving and found she didn’t mind a bit.

They had fun in their cities of choice, and on their way through the infamously crime-ridden Gotham, inside an old cafe, Chloe snagged a local paper and said frankly, “Well that’s horrible.”

“It’s Gotham,” said Pete without looking at the news. “Of course it’s horrible.”

“No, I’m serious! This rich socialite, his parents were killed in front of him by gunshot in some back alley. He dropped out of university, and now after her parents’ killer was killed by gang activity he’s disappeared.”

“What, like - just dropped off the face of the earth?” said Charlie curiously.

“Yeah. Some old homeless guy said someone who looks like the socialite gave him his coat and then just walked off. Said something cryptic about how everybody would be looking for him. As far as anyone can tell, they were his last words.”

“Cry me a river. The guy must be worth at least ten million,” said Pete with a distinct lack of sympathy.

“Hm. It’s too bad. He was hot, too,” said Chloe clinically.

“Let me see,” said Charlie curiously. Chloe showed her the picture in the paper. “Bruce Wayne…” she said softly. “Like Wayne Enterprises?”

“Yeah, exactly them. They’re like one of the only people in Gotham who as far as anyone can tell get their money honorably. That’s why it was so horrific when they died,” said Chloe.

“When was that?”

“Oh, over a decade ago. This Wayne guy was nine,” said Chloe. “It says in the article.”

“That’s really awful,” said Charlie. “Rich and corporate or not, nobody deserves a fate like that.”

“Yeah. Now let’s get out of here before the same thing happens to us,” said Chloe, and they stood to pay and leave.

It was a story Charlie would not be reminded of until a little over four years later.

18.

Smallville High’s campus was set right in the middle of downtown Smallville. Charlie took a deep breath, backpack over her shoulders, as she walked from her car and onto campus that first day. She passed through the double doors, found Pete and Chloe, and hung with them in the corner.

“I got us spots on The Torch,” said Chloe nervously. “That’s the school paper here.”

“Yeah, I signed up for robotics over the summer too,” said Charlie absently, looking around, nervous. “Wow. Look at all the older people.”

“Yeah, we need a strategy, because I am seriously freaking out,” said Pete, voice jangling with nerves.

“... I’m sorry, I know I should be thinking about social strategy, but all I keep thinking about is how hot some of these guys look!” Chloe squealed, and she and Charlie giggled with mad nervousness. “Oh, and of course. Look who it is.”

Lana Lang was already a cheerleader, wearing the perky uniform, giggling and chatting with the rest of the cheerleaders. Close by was a girl surrounded by a posse; she had swishing perfumed blonde hair and wore pink Prada knockoffs.

“Someone needs to tell them they’re high school students in Smallville, Kansas,” Charlie muttered, “and it’s not going to be me.” Chloe and Pete snorted with laughter as the bell rang and they made their way to their very first homeroom.

19.

Nevertheless, they went to the high school parties.

Many of them were held outside - tailgate parties, hayrides, and other large congregations of teenagers out in the woods doing suspicious things at night.

Charlie drank beer and shot whiskey, laughing and joking with the guys like she was one of their own. But at the end of the night, she was always suspiciously sober, conveniently unavailable, going home with her friends instead.

A jealous Felice Chandler - the perfumed blonde girl in pink who turned out to head the drama department - at last stormed up to Charlie at one of these parties and snapped, “You know, nothing’s going to change the fact that you’re a fat hipster!”

The party went quieter; Charlie held her beer and smirked.

“I may be,” she said. “But I’m flirting with the guy you like, you have a fruity little drink because you can’t shoot whiskey with me, and I won’t be wearing botox and suntanning in beds when I’m thirty.”

Several guys laughed and oohed, including the guy Charlie had been talking to, and there were squeals of laughter from the girls.

“I’ll get you back for this, Kent,” Felice growled, and she swished away.

“I’m terrified,” Charlie called sarcastically after her. Charlie already got hate mail and she was stronger than an ox; what the hell did Felice Chandler think she could do?

She turned back to the guy she was flirting with, holding her beer, and grinned. “So? Where were we?”

20.

Lana Lang had become increasingly fascinated by Charlotte Kent as the years went by.

Lana didn’t like Felice Chandler, but she knew where the envy stemmed from. It wasn’t that Charlie was perfect, that wasn’t it. Rather, it was that Charlie rocked how imperfect she was.

Lana had spent her entire life wondering about her own self identity, and Charlie seemed to have it all figured out. That would have rubbed anyone the wrong way, anyone popular who tried so hard to get everybody to like them all the time. Because Charlie got people to like her and she made it all seem effortless.

She never faked it like so many of the other girls did.

Charlie was a waitress, Charlie could be seen at the town roller derby rink, Charlie was on the robotics team, she read different books and listened to interesting things, she shot whiskey, she dressed in bizarre fashions, and she rocked her body the way it was - not the way she wanted it to be. She wrote opinion pieces for the school paper, and she was loud, headstrong, funny, boyish, and sometimes obnoxious. Every time Felice Chandler went to bully her, the fearless Charlie, who continued to be herself, always had an acidic retort ready on the tip of her tongue.

Lana had never wanted to be anyone except perhaps for her late mother, but by their first month in high school she wanted to be Charlie Kent.

She took to walking up to Charlie, talking to her amiably, but Charlie seemed kind of uncomfortable and turned off to her at first. Finally, one day Charlie blurted out, “Could you take off your necklace? I - I think I’m allergic to the rock inside it.”

Lana looked down. Her necklace was made from green meteor rock.

“It’s making me sick,” said Charlie. “You might not want to wear it anyway. Chloe insists all that rock is irradiated.”

“Oh! That’s what it was!” Lana sighed in relief. “I thought you didn’t like me!” She laughed nervously. 

“No, that’s not what it is.” Charlie attempted a smile.

Lana stopped wearing the necklace, and after that Charlie seemed a little easier talking to her. Privately, Charlie was bewildered that popular cheerleader Lana Lang found her interesting at all, but she kept this confusion to herself.

Lana’s football jock boyfriend Whitney Fordman sooned joined Lana in all her goings, including going to talk to Charlie. They seemed attached at the the hip. Whitney privately thought Charlie was hot, but he said and did nothing because she was also weird. He had a reputation to uphold.

Justin Gaines, a quiet artist for The Torch that Charlie wrote for, had a crush on Charlie but he also said nothing for different, shyer reasons. He would get into a car wreck later that month and be out of Smallville High for a while.

Greg Arkin was blinded by the Lana lights, totally besotted by his lonely and increasingly deranged crush on her.

Meanwhile, Pete Ross was increasingly considering asking Charlie to the homecoming dance. And Charlie herself knew high school aged roller derby tryouts were happening soon. She began marshalling her arguments for her parents.


End file.
